February 1, 2011Why StackOverflow sucks and participating there is impossible

StackExchange/StackOverflow is broke. Real broke.

Have you tried to participate in it? If so then you know how broke it is. But for those of you who haven’t sit back and get a view into frustration.

New users are more likely to want to “dip their toe into the water” than to jump into a pool. In Stack land, this would mean adding a comment to an existing answer. But you can’t. You start out with only 1 “rep” which means that you can ask a question or add an answer to an existing question. So if you’re knowledgeable enough to provide a counterpoint to someone else’s poor answer, you have to post it as a new answer… and then you get down voted (lose rep!) for adding a new answer versus just commenting on the original, flawed answer.

So, the intelligent fellow you are, you decide to try and find a question that you can provide a good answer to so you can get real rep points so that you can contribute all over the place. So you dig through tags and search, but you quickly realize that every question that’s not some vague, poorly worded, open ended impossibility has already got 10 answers (ranging from wrong/poor to highly thoughtful, correct). So you start trolling the “New” list hoping to catch a question that you can answer quickly and hopefully get some rep/upvotes so you can actually participate in a useful fashion.

Then you see where Stack is really, really broken. You see you’re not the only one doing this. In the time it takes you to write a thoughtful, correctly documented (and heaven help you if you try and write code and then format it in the terrible editor), 6 people have written short, one line answers as placeholders and then they go back and edit their response multiple times, finally building an appropriate reply (hopefully). So now the question has 7 responses, all in some weird state of edit and your response is lost in the noise and you never get the rep points that you were trying for in the first place (ie. it was all a waste).

So I’m a pretty smart guy and this is why I can’t (and now won’t) participate on StackExchange sites (StackOverflow, OnStartups, etc.). I don’t have the patience to troll the new question list and fight the unwashed masses to try and get my voice heard in order to get a seat at the big boys table. I’m sure that I am not the only one making this same decision.

Edit: closing comments since I’m tired of moderating (and I didn’t delete any but the obvious spam). Thanks for letting me vent.

The issue is that your rep doesn’t transfer from one to the other. And my experience is with programming and startups so I basically have three SO sites to participate in (plus SharePoint, but that’s just like poking a stick in my eye, so I don’t want to go there!)

Once you hit a certain level of rep on one stackexchange site, you can link that account to a new account on another stackexchange site and start out with 100 free rep, which is generally enough to participate without pain.

Q&A sites have a natural trajectory: start good with a small but passionate audience, then get popular and the great unwashed come along and spoil things for everybody. I’m sure another q&a site will come along soon enough… get in on the “before the masses turn up” phase and you’ll be fine.

Never got the points thing on there (or anywhere else). how can a few virtual points being arbitrarily shuffled your way in any way motivate you?

I would suggest asking two or three solid questions and once you get a couple upvotes then start with the commenting like you’re suggesting. If you really have a hard time coming up with some questions to get answered, can I suggest posting a detailed question about IIS or the .NET internals that won’t get an immediate four or five pretentious “FGITW” answerers? You see, the problem you suggest is already well documented internally on the StackOverflow discussion site, meta.stackoverflow.com and is a sad state of the system but it is what it is.

So game the system? I asked a question last year and got 6 replies, even from the maintainer of the library I was questioning, and had to resolve it myself (recompiling, hacking code). I even made a codeproject article about it… but on SO, I didn’t have enough rep to add my own solution as a solution. Sigh.

I didn’t have an account there, but made one to answer a question: what is the most efficient way to find a substring in a string, but rotating around the end is allowed.”

I wrote 6 different algorithms (including the top answer’s suggestion), profiled them on 3 architectures, then joined to post my results (which were quite non-obvious — RAM bus speed was the deciding factor between algorithms). But it required high ‘rep’ because there were more than 20 answers already, so my analysis goes unpublished :(

I totally agree with you. I have run into many more frustrating limitations that you didn’t even mention. For example, I recently received this response to a very carefully written response where I had documented each of my facts with a hyperlink to the source:

“Oops! Your answer couldn’t be submitted because: we’re sorry, but as a spam prevention mechanism, new users can only post a maximum of one hyperlink. Earn more than 10 reputation to post more hyperlinks.”

This post makes me so happy! It means the StackOverflow system works. You may be very smart, I have no doubt about that. However, the welcome experience on SO is designed to select for personality more than skill. On a community Q&A site, how you convey what you know is much more important than how much you know. Judging from the tone of this post, I’m glad you don’t have the patience to get in. All in all, this has been a very poetic situation from end to end :D

Oh but I am in your internets already. I played the game and can now do what I want to do… but don’t you think that for every one of me that’s willing to jump through the fiery hoops that there are hundreds or thousands of people that decide not to… therefore making the SO community less than it could be?

Considering that SO is trying to be full of GOOD answers, doesn’t making it a game to actually provide a good answer actually defeat the purpose?

You seem to be taking this thing a little too seriously. It’s Q/A site so if you have something to add then just add it. The voting and rep systems are poor proxies for some metrics the stack guys decided to measure. The whole point is to create a useful repository of questions and answers. At this point I don’t even bother asking a question because most of the question I have already have 10 variations and a search is all it takes to uncover them.

I mentioned (a brief version of) this on Twitter, where I heard about this post: it depends on what you want out of your reputation on StackOverflow.

If you’re looking to build an easily-verified high standing in a reputation-based community as bullet point in your career profile, then you have to decide whether “living there” (or “investing at least a few minutes of every day”) is worth it to you.

If, on the other hand, you “just want” the reputation points in the same way you want the high score position on some multiplayer game, then I’d absolutely agree it’s a waste of time. A COLOSSAL waste of time. :-)

For myself, I worked hard enough to crest 10k in about a year and that’s “good enough” for me for the most part. I know others who’ve hit 20k and even 30k in a year. If it’s worth it to them for their career, then hey, but I tend to view it as a bit excessive. It’s more a sport for young developers who have no family or other responsibilities, for whom 24-hour coding is The Way and The Light. ;-)

There are other problems too.
1. Once it hit the critical stage of mass popularity, the quality of answers started to drop.
2. Now people don’t provide working code examples in their answers. They just say use the foo function with no example or explanation. The voting system isn’t weeding this crap out anymore.
3. People are linking to external site documentation in their answers, without providing their own example code. This especially annoys me when I explicitly state in a question that I have looked at such and such documentation, but it doesn’t help in the case I need.
4. The above types of answers don’t help me when I have another problem that someone else has already asked and gotten dozens of crap answers. No way to re-address the issue without getting creamed by moderators shutting down the question as already asked and answered.

I think that you miss the point. The idea is to get quality answers, not get points.

Also, if you provide a good answer, you _will_ eventually get reputation.

If you can only answer questions that get instantly dozens of answers, my call would be that you’re not very knowledgable about anything complicated. Stackoverflow doesn’t need anymore people answering how to turn a text red in css or select an element with jQuery. Maybe you don’t need to participate for the site to work since you bring nothing to the table except noise.